


Still Waters

by godsdaisiechain (preux)



Category: Anne of Avonlea (TV), Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Fear of Discovery, Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-12 23:52:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/817510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/preux/pseuds/godsdaisiechain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: Matthew Cuthbert. There was never a girl but once there had been a boy</p><p>Summary: Matthew Cuthbert loved a boy once.  And the boy loved him. But boys couldn’t love each other in Avonlea. Set as flashbacks at the end of Anne of Green Gables and bridging into Anne of Avonlea.</p><p>Warnings: Canonical major character deaths.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still Waters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Elennare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elennare/gifts).



> This is my first fic in this fandom and I can’t find any m/m pairings. I hope this is OK for those of you who know the fandom.
> 
> Many, many thanks to elennare for the beta!!!

 

They say that still waters run deep, and no one would ever discover how deep were the places that Matthew Cuthbert’s seeming stillness sheltered and protected. Matthew Cuthbert lay dying. His adopted daughter, Anne Shirley sat beside him and Marilla, his sister, hovered in the doorway, waiting for the doctor and the minister. Matthew was grateful for their loving presence, but he wished that Tommy could have come to him.  The poor man would feel so guilty, would blame himself.  

Everyone else thought his heart had failed because of the money, but Tommy would think it had been his fault.  Matthew wished he could have just one more talk with the meek little man, set him at his ease.  It would be too much to ask to hold his hand or kiss him, he knew, but a last smile would have meant a great deal to two old men. 

***** 

Matthew had known Tommy most of his life.  The teacher had sat them together on their first day of school, and they had learned to read and write hunched over the same battered piece of slate. They had been quieter and meeker than the other boys and gravitated together naturally, doing things boys liked to do, but in a milder way. Their quiet camaraderie was a byword in Avonlea. They were seen together swimming and fishing, climbing trees and painting fences, the sort of things that boys did together. Sometimes they played with the other boys, but often enough on their own. In a humble way, not much attended to, they took their places in the general run of things at school and church. Thomas’s brothers were rougher souls, not ill-natured, but his father was grateful that there was a playmate to take the mild boy off his hands at times.

By the time Matthew and Thomas were twelve, they could communicate with a look. Two people had never been so close. Not that either of them spoke very much of such things. In fact, neither of them spoke very much at all. When they turned fifteen, Matthew had begun to fret about his shyness with girls, but Tommy reassured him. “You’ll see someone you like one day, Matthew.”  Matthew had hoped he would.

There never was a girl.  But there was a boy. There was a boy, and Matthew loved him with all his heart.

He had not quite understood himself until Tommy explained.  They roughhoused sometimes, sat close when they fished or rowed, worked like they shared arms and legs.  “Matthew,” said Tommy one day while they were sitting pressed up against each other, fishing. The young man put a hand on his friend’s thigh. 

Matthew looked up, surprised, then looked at his friend’s lap. He felt the same stirring and he froze. “I want to kiss you, too.”  Tommy said this as though it made everything somehow different, this feeling in their bodies they had been taught was a sin. And Matthew realized that it did make everything different. They loved each other, heart and mind and soul, and this was a natural expression of that closeness. How could it be wrong?

Matthew looked his truest friend in the eyes and nodded. “Not here.” 

They found a place in the woods between their homes and they kissed, two young men, discovering love together. It became their place, and the boys’ tongues were loosened for the first time in their lives. Over the years, they built a shelter there.  The neighbors took it for a hunting blind.

They talked, sharing their hopes and dreams and feelings.  Tommy didn’t laugh when Matthew shyly confessed that he longed for a fine suit of clothes and shiny shoes.  And Matthew looked at his friend admiringly when Tommy confessed that he wanted to run off and see the world. He wondered how Tommy dared to want such a thing.

One day, Matthew thought of something that would make Tommy laugh and looked up at his father with shining eyes. The young man grew abashed when he saw his father’s startled expression, but Mark Cuthbert was a gentle soul, like his son after him. “Well, son,” he said mildly, secretly pleased that the boy had looked to him with that joyous expression. “I think I’d like to hear whatever has you so entertained.” Sheepishly, Matthew shared his thought. Old Mark Cuthbert chuckled gladly at his son’s observation, patting the boy fondly on the shoulder, but afterwards he grew more than usually thoughtful. For his part, Matthew tried to seem just as he was before, but his father had seen something in the boy, something that saddened him. Matthew only knew that his father had grown more apt to squeeze his shoulder, give him extra pocket money, send him for a walk.  

His mother, Molly, chalked the change up to the end of his schooling. “He never did like going out among all those rough boys,” she observed to Mark one evening. “You did right to have him finish, but he does seem easier now. Lighter somehow.  It’s a blessing to see him so happy.” Mark grunted in his noncommittal way. His wife had no knowledge of falling in love, and Mark knew that ultimately this was no blessing for their fine, good son.  He pressed a hand against the small of her back and kissed his wife’s graying head.  They had never been demonstrative, but he was grateful that she felt so much affection for their boy. She baked his favorite desserts for the next week. 

A week later, Matthew’s father moved him to the bedroom downstairs off the kitchen. “Sometimes a boy needs a bit of space to think,” the quiet man had said to his wife. It would be years before Matthew understood what his father had done for him, but at the time, it seemed merely providential. Now the boys could slip out and meet each other. Never had two friends been more joyous in their shared love for one another. It was the beginning of a golden time, the best time of his life until Anne had come to him in his old age.  Matthew marveled at the way time played with him, now that he was coming to the end of his days.

At first the friends only kissed, but they met at night and cuddled under the stars. Eventually, in slow, cautious steps, they began to make love to each other. Their sense of wonderment at the pleasure they could give each other as they discovered their fit, healthy bodies seemed almost like a miracle.  Neither of them imagined that so much pleasure could exist in the world. They savored each tentative step in their shared intimacy, wordlessly reassuring each other through the awkwardness that attends such activities.  

It was easier in the summer, and they had a series of loving interludes together when they were supposed to be off at dances meeting eligible girls to marry. Both of them were so mild and shy and quiet that no one saw anything odd in their standoffish behavior at these events. And who would question them staying together? Tommy took care to make sure that they came back smelling of smoke once or twice.  They endured the scoldings cheerfully enough.  Once, Matthew’s mother asked if they were sneaking off to play cards, but Matthew looked so surprised that it put her mind at rest. It would not have occurred to anyone to question them about anything else.    

Matthew could have burst with happiness, except that he knew, somehow, that it would not last. And he knew that Tommy knew also, for all his talk of running off together when they were men grown and had saved enough money. The two young men remained tender and soft, providing a refuge for each other against the sorrow that loomed inevitably on their horizon.  Avonlea was their entire world, and there was no place for men like them to live openly there. They could leave, but they would never find a home and community again. Besides, they knew that love itself was a fragile thing and might not survive the strains of hardship and isolation. 

When Matthew turned twenty-three, something else happened.  Two young men were discovered living together in the woods outside Carmody.  They had been beaten to death.  Mark Cuthbert went white and let the newspaper drop from his hand when he read the story.  “Terrible business,” he observed sadly. Marilla pressed her lips together and turned away.

“They did sin,” said Matthew’s mother slowly and doubtfully with a glance at her husband, trying to see both sides of the thing. “But I don’t, for the life of me, see why anyone would beat two young men to death like that. Hard workers from good families, it says. Those poor lost souls.”  Mark Cuthbert looked hopelessly at his wife. She turned to her best refuge in times of doubt. “We will pray for them and their poor families, those ruined, wasted lives.”

It marked the end of the golden time not just for Matthew and Tommy. Marilla had been walking out with one of the Blythe boys, and stopped suddenly.  Only Matthew ever learned the truth of that quarrel. He had been standing near the woodpile thinking about the soft place at the back of Tommy’s neck and how he wanted to kiss it, when the couple returned from a walk.  They did not see him.  Then the boy had called the young men in Carmody by an ugly name.  Matthew froze in cold horror, his heart pounding in his breast. Then Marilla said she had no use for anyone who could say such a thing. They parted that night forever.

Marilla had loved the man and never understood why those words had frozen her heart.  But they had. Matthew’s own heart swelled with gratitude when he realized that his sister had given her all to protect him, without even understanding what she was doing.  She never discovered Matthew’s secret.

All in all, then, that eighth summer was less idyllic than the ones that had gone before. Then Tommy had begun to spend time in the approved way with a young woman.  Neither of the friends said anything about it, but Tommy’s father had spoken a few quiet words to his son. It took several years, and several young women before Tommy fell in the way of the woman he would marry.  Rachel was strong and outspoken, but a great worker, just what a mild man would need on a farm the size of Lynde’s Hollow. The two friends settled into a more careful routine, but no one would have suspected them even if they had been careless. After all, Tommy was keeping company with a respectable young woman and Matthew was so shy. What harm was it for the young men to be friends? 

***** 

Matthew stood by his friend on his wedding day, wearing a splendid tie that Tommy bought him during a trip to the mainland.  The friends had not said so, but they knew it was only a poor shadow of the things they had wanted to give each other.  No one thought it the least bit odd that Tommy looked at Matthew while he made his wedding vows.  He had always been so meek and hesitant to show his feelings.

At first, Matthew remained Tommy’s lover, pushing down the guilt at crossing the barrier between their innocent boyhood explorations and what others would now call adultery, or worse. But poor Tommy’s spirit was dying and Matthew could not abandon him in his hour of need. So Matthew helped his friend and lover through the difficult adjustment of sharing his peace and privacy with such a robust spirit. Eventually, Tommy weakened and asked Matthew to run off with him. Matthew refused. It wasn’t right.  Not now that Tommy was a married man with a child on the way. 

The friends quarreled. It was the only time a harsh word passed between them and they both staggered home, shaken to their very cores. Matthew’s mother fretted, fearful he had caught a summer flu. But Mark Cuthbert had been extremely watchful during those difficult months.

That evening, Matthew found his father sitting on his bed, holding a battered shirt.  Matthew remembered it from when he was a boy. Molly had tried to take it for rags, and Mark had refused in a strange, strangled voice.  It was so unlike Mark Cuthbert to speak about such a thing that she had let him have his way. “I am sorry, son. I hoped it wouldn’t be this way for you, too.”

Matthew, heart sore and suffering, had no idea what his father meant at first, why his hands were twisted in the old shirt. “His name was Paul.  We only had a few months....”  Matthew gaped in astonished horror. How had his father guessed what Matthew and Tommy had been doing? “I didn’t have the heart to deny you.  You might have gone west together.  There would have been money enough laid by next year to start you out.”

The kind sympathy undid the young man. Mark petted his son awkwardly as Matthew finally allowed himself to understand the magnitude of his loss. Matthew felt his face crumple and he cried for the first time since he had been a little boy. “Ah, son, you’ll learn to bear it.” Matthew gasped and swallowed, then sobbed again for his lost hopes and dreams.

Mark convinced his wife that Matthew had a summer flu and they let him keep to his bed for a few days. On the third day, Mark had come to check on his only son. “I won’t hold you,” he offered, looking at the dumb suffering on the young man’s face, but they both knew it was too late.  Matthew would never go out among strangers on his own. 

*****

Matthew grew resigned to the future. He could not leave Marilla, not after all she had sacrificed for him, nor could he leave Tommy. Supported by his family’s unspoken love and his father’s sympathy, Matthew seemed much like his old self, but Tommy began to pine visibly. Rumor had it that he had begun to sleep in the barn to escape Rachel’s nagging.  Matthew patiently waited, but Tommy never came to him.

In the end, Rachel Lynde effected the reconciliation. She walked to Green Gables one afternoon, holding a basket covered with a cloth napkin. “I’ve made you a pie,” she said, handing Matthew a plate, resting her hand on her swollen belly.  The young man looked at her dumbly, like an animal caught in a trap. “Please come to him.  You were always such friends.” 

Matthew looked at the plate, stammered an apology.  “Please, Matthew.” Rachel Lynde had never begged for anything before, but she begged now. “Please.”  Matthew shuffled his feet. Then she said the only thing that would have convinced him.  “I thought he had sent his father, that he knew...” Matthew’s belly twisted with guilt and shame. He had never even thought about poor Rachel, a young woman married to man who feared her, living in a house full of strangers, all angry with her because of the change in Tommy. “Oh, please tell me what to do for him,” she whispered. “I thought I understood.”

“Let him be quiet,” said Matthew slowly, eyes fixed on the pie.  Rachel waited patiently, her eyes brimming with tears of gratitude. “He doesn’t like to talk.”  Matthew shook himself, thought about how difficult energetic, intelligent Rachel Lynde must find living with such a meek, silent man. A silent man who did not love her and who viewed their marital relations with distaste. He thought about the joyous wonder of his own connection with Tommy and then thought how shamed she must feel sharing a marriage bed with a man who was disgusted by the contact. “It must be hard for you, too.” Her mouth opened in surprise.  “Maybe you could do other things. Keep busy.”

A weight fell from Rachel’s heart at that diffident suggestion.  She could keep busy and let Thomas make his own way. “Thank you, Matthew.  Thank you for helping me.” Rachel Lynde went home and began to knit a cotton warp quilt, looking out the kitchen window at the world around her. From that day forward, Tommy Lynde began to be more comfortable in married life. 

***** 

The two men lived next door to each other for the rest of their lives.  Every once in a while, they would meet. They were still young men and it had sometimes been too much to go very long without a kiss or the feel of their bare skins pressed together. As the Lynde children came and grew up, it grew more and more difficult to see each other alone. Sometimes they took a trip into town together and once they went to the mainland, a few stolen days in a sea of lonely years. Matthew went to their place and sometimes he left a token, a picture cut from a magazine, a carving for the man he loved. Tommy visited also, but less frequently as the years passed and the joy faded. The first time a month passed without a token, Matthew sobbed himself to sleep.

In the morning, his father had looked at him narrowly. “When I became a man, I put childish things aside,” said Mark Cuthbert gently. Matthew nodded miserably. That afternoon, Mark Cuthbert brought Matthew into town and signed over the farm to his son.  

***** 

The pains had bothered Matthew for days before the news came about the bank failure that robbed him of his life’s savings.  He had been out walking in the woods and he found himself in their place.  He frequently did in those days, as he lost the strength to work hard enough to exhaust himself.  The time passed slowly sometimes and he found himself reflecting on the past, remembering the hushed awe that had accompanied their first tentative expressions of affection, the joy of skinny dipping, the long talks in the dark of night while watching a dance or party in full swing.  He missed the feeling of closeness with another person. That day, he found Tommy sitting there, head in his hands. 

“I made a mistake,” said Tommy sadly.  “All those years ago. I should have run off and sent for you.”

Matthew looked at his feet. Time had dulled the searing pain of their loss to a dull ache, but it flared again, fresh and new as if it had been yesterday. A few years before, he would not have understood such a passionate grief over their long-ago troubles, but having Anne in his life had opened his heart again, the way it had been open when he and Tommy were young and just discovering the magic of the world around them. “You had to marry Rachel.”

“But I loved you.” Matthew’s heart contracted.  “I made plans to protect you.” 

Matthew had promised himself that he would save Tommy the grief of ever seeing how deeply he had been hurt by their separation. “It would have ruined everything between us, leaving like that.”

“She would have been able to hold her head up.”

“But how could I let you do such wrong?” Tommy looked up and Matthew saw the old love there. “We had so many years, so much.”

Tommy shook his head sadly. He drew a shuddering breath. “I didn’t really understand until my wedding night. I thought I could still come to you.”

Matthew smiled gently.  He remembered the way Tommy had cried in his arms afterward. Tommy stood up and wrapped his arms around Matthew and it felt as if they had never been parted. The friends kissed. Matthew felt relief, but then Tommy spoke of taking a trip together, a trip out west, and Matthew’s insides twisted, reminding him of the stalled hope when the engagement announcement had gone out the very afternoon Matthew had agreed to take their chances and go west. He had forced himself to forget the guilty look on Tommy’s face when he explained that his father had fixed things up with Rachel’s father. If only Tommy had agreed to run off that long-ago afternoon, Matthew would have gone gladly and blindly to the ends of the earth with him.  

At home that night, Matthew opened the envelope from the bank and collapsed with a blinding pain in his chest. 

***** 

Matthew Cuthbert lay dying.  Anne Shirley was there, and Marilla, the sister who had kept house for him for so many years. Tommy wished he could go to him, hold his hand and kiss him one last time. As he thought back to their golden days of youth, the hope that had been cast out by his marriage, Tommy’s heart broke.

Rachel Lynde’s husband was so meek and mild that no one else would have noticed his discomfort when he returned from his walk. One of the reasons she had always been so vigilant was a long-forgotten suspicion about her husband in those early years, although she thought he loved another woman. By dint of interfering with everyone in Avonlea, she managed to shield him, and herself, from shame. She had cared for him as much as she could, but she was not a woman made for softness. Part of her understood that afternoon that his heart had taken a sickening blow and she could not help him.

A few days later, he shuffled to Matthew’s grave, pale and trembling, and dropped a token like the ones they had exchanged as boys, but no one noticed him.  Within a year, Tommy would be dead as well. Men of his meek and gentle disposition never last very long after the one who holds their heart dies. At the funeral, Rachel Lynde scanned the crowd, wondering where her husband’s lover was, never knowing that he had gone on before. 


End file.
